Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
It is a sin to lie, so maybe the Archbishop would care to explain just how many migrants are coming here because of climate change, which countries they are coming from, and provide the data to prove it.
The Archbishop of Canterbury has torn shreds out of the Illegal Immigration Bill, labelling it “isolationist, morally unacceptable and politically impractical”, with “too many problems” to highlight in one speech.
Justin Welby attacked Rishi Sunak’s plan to ‘stop the boats’, which is facing its second major Parliamentary hurdle, with peers in the House of Lords scrutinising the controversial proposal.
“This bill has no sense at all of the long term and the global nature of the challenge that the world faces,” the religious leader said.
“It ignores the reality that global migration must be engaged with at source as well as in the Channel as if we as a country were unrelated to the rest of the world.”
The archbishop added the Bill does not address issues that are causing mass migration, including wars and climatechange, saying it is “isolationist, it is morally unacceptable and politically impractical” to leave those problems to poorer countries.
It is a sin to lie, so maybe the Archbishop would care to explain just how many migrants are coming here because of climate change, which countries they are coming from, and provide the data to prove it.
Otherwise people might rightly think you are talking through that pointy hat of yours!
They might also suggest that you are so woefully out of touch with the real world that you do not belong in your job.
We’ve got ourselves another round of field data–i.e., facts–not fitting the polar-bears-are-starving-to-death narrative. According to polar bear specialist Andrew Derocher, Western Hudson Bay polar bears his team saw in April while installing collars and ear tags were in good shape this year, as he said they were last year.
Canada, Manitoba, Churchill, Polar Bear (Ursus maritimus) swimming by melting sea ice in Hudson Bay on summer evening
We’ve got ourselves another round of field data–i.e., facts–not fitting the polar-bears-are-starving-to-death narrative. According to polar bear specialist Andrew Derocher, Western Hudson Bay polar bears his team saw in April while installing collars and ear tags were in good shape this year, as he said they were last year. There was no spring field work in 2021 and 2020 but in 2019, he also said the bears he saw were in good condition.
Andrew Derocher 4 May 2023, reporting on Western Hudson Bay field work
Two years in a row of bears in good condition in spring–with no mention of starving bears–does not fit the picture of a population supposedly declining due to starvation. The most recent population count for WH, which garnered wide-spread media attention just before Christmas last year, claims that a 27% decline in numbers took place between 2017 and the fall of 2021 even though sea ice conditions had been good during those five years as well. It’s a perplexing situation. Makes me really wonder what that survey report actually says, but it still hasn’t been released, five months after the results made news around the world.
Andrew Derocher and his team of students from University of Alberta have been monitoring WH polar bears for years. They go out every spring, in April, to tag and collar bears. Derocher communicates almost exclusively via Twitter, so there is seldom anything more than brief snippets of information provided. Links below to his original tweets:Spring 2023 – bears reported in good conditionSpring 2022 – bears reported in good conditionSpring 2021 – no field work but a population survey was done that fallSpring 2020 – no field work but a number of bears left the ice as late as the 1980s, in mid-to-late AugustSpring 2019 – bears reported in good condition and left the ice in August, as late as 1980s
Hudson Bay sea ice conditions
The patch of thick sea ice (>1m, dark green) over the central portion of the bay isn’t as extensive as it often is in early May, which may mean breakup will come earlier than it has for the last few years:
Many governments in the Western world have committed to “net zero” emissions of carbon in the near future. The US and UK both say they will deliver by 2050. It’s widely believed that wind and solar power can achieve this. This belief has led the US and British governments, among others, to promote and heavily subsidise wind and solar.
Many governments in the Western world have committed to “net zero” emissions of carbon in the near future. The US and UK both say they will deliver by 2050. It’s widely believed that wind and solar power can achieve this. This belief has led the US and British governments, among others, to promote and heavily subsidise wind and solar.
These plans have a single, fatal flaw: they are reliant on the pipe-dream that there is some affordable way to store surplus electricity at scale.
In the real world a wind farm’s output often drops below 10 per cent of its rated “capacity” for days at a time. Solar power disappears completely every night and drops by 50 per cent or more during cloudy days. “Capacity” being a largely meaningless figure for a wind or solar plant, about 3000 megawatts (MW) of wind and solar capacity is needed to replace a 1000 MW conventional power station in terms of energy over time: and in fact, as we shall see, the conventional power station or something very like it will still be needed frequently once the wind and solar are online.
The governments of countries with a considerable amount of wind and solar generation have developed an expectation that they can simply continue to build more until net zero is achieved. The reality is that many of them have kept the lights on only by using existing fossil fired stations as backup for periods of low wind and sun. This brings with it a new operating regime where stations that were designed to operate continuously have to follow unpredictable fluctuations in wind and solar power. As a result operating and maintenance costs have increased and many stations have had to be shut down.
In fact it’s already common to see efficient combined-cycle gas turbines replaced by open-cycle ones because they can be throttled up and down easily to back up the rapidly changing output of wind and solar farms. But open-cycle gas turbines burn about twice as much gas as combined cycle gas turbines. Switching to high-emissions machinery as part of an effort to reduce emissions is, frankly, madness!
Certain countries are helped because their power systems are supported by major inter-connectors to adjacent regions that have surplus power available. The increasingly troubled French nuclear fleet, which formerly had plenty of spare energy on tap, for a long time helped to make renewables plans look practical across Western Europe.
But this situation is not sustainable in the long term. Under net-zero plans, all nations will need to generate many times more electricity than they now can, as the large majority of our energy use today is delivered by burning fossil fuels directly. Neighbouring regions will be unable to provide the backup power needed; emissions from open cycle gas turbines (or new coal powerplants, as in the case of Germany at the moment) will become unacceptable; more existing base load stations will be forced to shut down by surges in renewables; more and more wind and solar power will have to be expensively dumped when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing.
Power prices will soar, making more or less everything more expensive, and there will be frequent blackouts. None of this is difficult to work out. Building even more renewables capacity will not help: even ten or 100 times the nominally-necessary “capacity” could never do the job on a cold, windless evening.
Only one thing can save the day for the renewables plan. Reasonable cost, large scale energy storage, sufficient to keep the lights on for several days at a minimum, would solve the problem.
What are the options?
First we need to consider the scale of the issue. Relatively simple calculations show that that California would need over 200 megawatt-hours (MWh) of storage per installed MW of wind and solar power. Germany could probably manage with 150 MWh per MW. Perhaps this could be provided in the form of batteries?
The current cost of battery storage is about US$600,000 per MWh. For every MW of wind or solar power in California, $120 million would need to be spent on storage. In Germany it would be $90 million. Wind farms cost about $1.5 million per MW so the cost of battery storage would be astronomical: 80 times greater than the cost of the wind farm! A major additional constraint would be that such quantities of batteries are simply not available. Not enough lithium and cobalt and other rare minerals are being mined at the moment. If prices get high enough supply will expand, but prices are already ridiculously, unfeasibly high.
Some countries are gambling on hydro pumped storage. Here the idea is to use electricity to pump water uphill into a high reservoir using surplus renewables on sunny, windy days: then let it flow back down through generating turbines as in a normal hydropower plant when it’s dark and windless.
Many pumped systems have been built in China, Japan and United States but they have storage sufficient for only 6 to 10 hours operation. This is tiny compared with the several days storage that is needed to back up wind and solar power through routine sunless calm periods. Much larger lakes at the top and bottom of the scheme are needed. There are very few locations where two large lakes can be formed with one located 400-700 m above the other and separated by less than 5-10 km horizontally. Such a location must also have an adequate supply of make-up water to cope with evaporation losses from the two lakes. Another problem is that at least 25 per cent of the energy is lost while pumping and then generating.
Hydro pumped storage will seldom be a feasible option. It cannot solve the problem on a national scale even in countries like the USA which have a lot of mountains.
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) for fossil fuel stations is also touted as way of avoiding the problems of wind and solar power. But this is not a technology, just a case of wishful thinking. In spite of many years of work and enormous amounts of money spent, nobody has yet devised a technology that can provide large scale, low cost CCS. Even if capture worked and didn’t consume most or all the energy generated, storing the carbon dioxide is a huge problem because three tonnes of carbon dioxide are produced for every tonne of coal burned.
Hydrogen is another technology which is often suggested for energy storage: but its problems are legion. At the moment hydrogen is made using natural gas (so-called “blue” hydrogen). This, however, will have to stop in a net-zero world as the process emits large amounts of carbon: you might as well just burn the natural gas. Proper emissions-free “green” hydrogen is made from water using huge amounts of electrical energy, 60 per cent of which is lost in the process. Storing and handling the hydrogen is extremely difficult because hydrogen is a very small molecule and it leaks through almost anything. At best this means that a lot of your stored hydrogen will be gone by the time you want to use it: at worst it means devastating fires and explosions. The extremely low density of hydrogen also means that huge volumes of it would have to be stored and it would often have to be stored and handled cryogenically, creating even more losses, costs and risks.
The conclusion is simple. Barring some sort of miracle, there is no possibility that a suitable storage technology will be developed in the needed time frame. The present policies of just forcing wind and solar into the market and hoping for a miracle have been memorably and correctly likened to “jumping out of an aeroplane without a parachute and hoping that the parachute will be invented, delivered and strapped on in mid air in time to save you before you hit the ground.” Wind and solar need to be backed up, close to 100 per cent, by some other means of power generation. If that backup is provided by open-cycle gas or worse, coal, net zero will never be achieved: nor anything very close to it.
There is one technology that can provide a cheap and reliable supply of low-emissions electricity: nuclear power. Interest in nuclear power is increasing as more and more people realise that it is safe and reliable. If regulators and the public could be persuaded that modern stations are inherently safe and that low levels of nuclear radiation are not dangerous, nuclear power could provide all the low cost, low emissions electricity the world needs for hundreds or thousands of years. But if we had 100 per cent nuclear backup for solar and wind, we wouldn’t need the wind and solar plants at all. Wind and solar are, in fact, completely pointless.
Bryan Leyland MSc, DistFEngNZ, FIMechE, FIEE(rtd) is a power systems engineer with more than 60 years experience on projects around the world. He is a member of the GWPF’s Academic Advisory Council
The key issue is this: the IPCC focuses on “dangerous anthropogenic climate change,” which leads to ignoring natural climate change, focusing on extreme emissions scenarios, and cherry picking the time periods and the literature to make climate change appear “dangerous.”
“The new Report provides an independent assessment of the most important parts of AR6. We document biases and errors in almost every chapter we reviewed. In some cases, of course, one can quibble endlessly about our criticism and how relevant it is for the overall ‘climate narrative’ of the IPCC. In some cases, though, we document such blatant cherry picking by the IPCC, that even ardent supporters of the IPCC should feel embarrassed.”
Climate Intelligence (CLINTEL) is an independent foundation that operates in the fields of climate change and climate policy. CLINTEL was founded in 2019 by emeritus professor of geophysics Guus Berkhout and science journalist Marcel Crok.
The CLINTEL Report is edited by Marcel Crok and Andy May, with contributions from Javier Vinos, Ross McKitrick, Ole Humlum, Nicola Scafetta, and Fritz Vahrenholt.
The Chapter topics are:
No confidence that the present is warmer than the mid-Holocene
The resurrection of the Hockey Stick
Measuring global surface temperature
Controversial Snow Trends
Accelerated sea level rise: not so fast
Why does the IPCC downplay the Sun?
Misty climate sensitivity
AR6: more confidence that models are unreliable
Extreme scenarios
A miraculous sea level jump in 2020
Hiding the good news on hurricanes and floods
Extreme views on disasters
Say goodbye to climate hell, welcome climate heaven
The key issue is this: the IPCC focuses on “dangerous anthropogenic climate change,” which leads to ignoring natural climate change, focusing on extreme emissions scenarios, and cherry picking the time periods and the literature to make climate change appear “dangerous.”
“The IPCC ignored crucial peer-reviewed literature showing that normalised disaster losses have decreased since 1990 and that human mortality due to extreme weather has decreased by more than 95% since 1920. The IPCC, by cherry picking from the literature, drew the opposite conclusions, claiming increases in damage and mortality due to anthropogenic climate change.”
With regards to IPCC AR6’s error ridden assessment of extreme weather events, see also this analysis by Roger Pielke Jr that demonstrated egregious errors in incorrectly reporting the conclusions from papers that were actually cited by the IPCC.
With regards to ignoring natural climate variability, Chapters 1 (mid-Holocene), 2 (Hockey Stick) and 6 (the sun) are excellent.
I’ve looked at the AR6 WGI Report fairly thoroughly, focusing mainly on specific material that was relevant for my new book Climate Uncertainty and Risk. I am familiar with nearly all of the issues raised in the CLINTEL Report, but the material in Chapters 2 (Hockey Stick) and 4 (snow trends) was new to me. The next section focuses on the Hockey Stick.
Zombie Hockey Stick
Shortly after publication of AR6 WGI, I spotted some comments in twitter regarding the resurrection of the Hockey Stick. After wondering “what fresh new Hockey Stick hell is this?”, I didn’t investigate further.
Well the Clintel Report did the work for me. Subtitle for Chapter 2:
“A big surprise in the new IPCC report is the publication of a brand new hockey stick. The IPCC once again has to cherry pick and massage proxy data in order to fabricate it. Studies that show larger natural climate variations are ignored.”
Excerpts from the Chapter:
<begin quotes>
The PAGES 2k group is specialised in climate reconstructions and back in 2013 was comprised of the majority of all active paleoclimatologists. The PAGES 2k Consortium (2013) published a reconstruction in which parts of the first millennium were occasionally as warm as present-day
In 2019, PAGES 2k published a new version of the temperature development of the past 2000 years (PAGES 2k Consortium, 2019)11. Surprisingly, it differed greatly from the predecessor version. Even though the database had only mildly changed, the pre-industrial part was now suddenly nearly flat again. The hockey stick was reborn.
The new hockey stick was immediately incorporated into the AR6 report (IPCC, 2021). Among the lead authors of AR6 chapter 2 is Darrell S. Kaufman who is a co-author of the new hockey stick in the PAGES 2k Consortium (2019). This is probably not a coincidence.
Evidence suggests that a significant part of the original PAGES 2k researchers could not technically support the new hockey stick and seem to have left the group in dispute. Meanwhile, the dropouts published a competing temperature curve with significant pre-industrial temperature variability (Büntgen et al., 2020). On the basis of thoroughly verified tree rings, the specialists were able to prove that summer temperatures had already reached today’s levels several times in the pre-industrial past. However, the work of Ulf Büntgen and colleagues was not included in the IPCC report, although it was published well before the editorial deadline.
Like its predecessor, the new hockey stick by PAGES 2k 2019 is based on a large variety of proxy types and includes a large number of poorly documented tree ring data. In many cases, the tree rings‘ temperature sensitivity is uncertain. For example, both PAGES 2k Consortium (2013) and PAGES 2k Consortium (2019) used tree ring series from the French Maritime Alps, even though tree ring specialists had previously cautioned that they are too complex to be used as overall temperature proxies.
In contrast, Büntgen et al. (2020) were more selective, relied on one type of proxy (in this case tree rings) and validated every tree ring data set individually. Their temperature composite for the extra-tropical northern hemisphere differs greatly from the studies that use bulk tree ring input.
In some cases, PAGES 2k composites have erroneously included proxies that later turned out to reflect hydroclimate and not temperature. In other cases, outlier studies have been selected in which the proxies exhibit an anomalous evolution that cannot be reproduced in neighbouring sites (e.g. MWP data from Pyrenees and Alboran Sea in PA13). Outliers can have several reasons, e.g. a different local development, invalid or unstable temperature proxies, or sample contamination.
Steve McIntyre has studied the PAGES 2k proxy data base in great detail and summarized his criticism in a series of blog posts on his website Climate Audit. For example, the PAGES 2k Consortium (2019) integrated a tree ring chronology from northern Pakistan near Gilgit (“Asia_207”) which shows an extreme closing uptick. Incorporation of data series like this strongly promote the hockey stick geometry of the resulting temperature composite. McIntyre analysed the original tree ring data and found that the steep uptick in the Asia_207 chronology is the result of questionable data processing. When calculating the site chronology using the rcs function from Andy Bunn’s dplR package, the uptick surprisingly disappears. In fact, the series declines over the 20th century.
Conclusion: The resurrected hockey stick of AR6 shows how vulnerable the IPCC process is to scientific bias. Cherry picking, misuse of the peer review process, lack of transparency, and likely political interference have led to a gross misrepresentation of the pre-industrial temperature evolution.
<end quotes>
JC reflections
The CLINTEL Report provides a much needed critical evaluation and intellectual counterpoint to the IPCC AR6.
There is a lot of good material in the AR6 WG1 Report, but there is also a lot of cherry picking and flat out errors in the Report (the AR6 WG2 Report is just flat out bad). With any kind of serious review, or if the author teams have been sufficiently diverse, we would not see so many of these kinds of errors. Unfortunately, the IPCC defines “diversity” in terms of gender, race and developed versus underdeveloped countries; actual diversity of thought and perspective is dismissed in favor of promoting the politically mandated narrative from the UN.
The consensus disease that that was caught by the IPCC following publication of the First Assessment Report in 1990, combined with pressures from policy makers, is resulting in documents that don’t reflect the broad disagreement and uncertainties on these complex topics. The IPCC’s mandated narrative has become very stale. Worse yet, it is becoming increasingly irrelevant to policy making by continuing to focus on extreme emissions scenarios and the embarrassing cherry picking that is required to support the “climate crisis” narrative that is so beloved by UN officials.
In any event, UN-driven climate policy has moved well past any moorings in climate science, even the relatively alarming version reported by the IPCC. The insane policies and deadlines tied to greenhouse gas emissions are simply at odds with the reality of our understanding of climate change and the uncertainties, and with broader considerations of human well being.
Along with giant batteries and ‘green’ hydrogen, pumped hydro is touted as the solution to wind and solar power’s hopeless intermittency. Five years ago, Australia’s PM, Malcolm Turnbull pitched his very own mega-pumped hydro project, tagged Snowy 2.0.
Along with giant batteries and ‘green’ hydrogen, pumped hydro is touted as the solution to wind and solar power’s hopeless intermittency. Five years ago, Australia’s PM, Malcolm Turnbull pitched his very own mega-pumped hydro project, tagged Snowy 2.0.
The numbering was meant to be a nod to computer program upgrades and signal an improvement on the original Snowy scheme – without doubt – the single greatest renewable energy project ever built in Australia – with a mammoth 3,950 MW of capacity, which is available on-demand (unlike the pointless nonsense that is wind power). It cost $1 billion (in today’s money) to build.
Except that five years later the 0 in Snowy 2.0 looks more like a quantification of the amount of power the scheme is likely to deliver.
The plan never stacked up economically – see our posts here and here – and is never likely to.
One of the tunnel boring machines (TBMs) critical to the project, Florence had barely struck a blow before grinding to an embarrassing halt, a hundred metres or so from the entrance, as the roof of the tunnel collapsed in and around the machine (see above). Snowy 2.0’s boosters are calling the debacle an unscheduled “pause”.
Ted Woodley is calling the whole fiasco an unmitigated disaster that needs to be terminated before any more taxpayer’s money gets squandered on Australia’s greatest white elephant.
Why it’s time to cut our losses and forget Snowy shambles The Australian Ted Woodley 5 May 2023
The hapless Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro project is again making headlines for all the wrong reasons, with this week’s announcement of a further one- to two-year delay pushing completion back to sometime in 2029.
This announcement comes on top of a one-year delay in January. So, in fact over the course of the past five months the official completion date has been delayed by three years, from 2026 to 2029.
Further delays are pretty well inevitable, extending completion into the 2030s.
When heralded as “Australia’s nation-building electricity game-changer” way back in March 2017, Snowy 2.0 was to be built in four years, unbelievably fast for such a large, complex project.
Ever since, there have been numerous updates, with completion always expected to be in four to six years’ time. Snowy 2.0 has been an engineering disaster from the start – obvious underestimates, exaggerated claims, obfuscation and ineptness – with the latest delay compounding the fiasco. Not one of Snowy Hydro’s pronouncements or project estimates over the past six years has turned out to be anywhere near true.
The standout debacle is Florence, one of three tunnel boring machines. Florence remains “paused” (Snowy Hydro spin) just 150 metres in from the start of the 17km headrace tunnel. Florence has been paused for nearly the entire 14 months since her commissioning in March 2022, despite multiple assurances that she was specifically designed to handle soft ground conditions.
Even if Florence miraculously started tunnelling at the “pace” of the other two TBMs, she would take eight years to complete the tunnel. As critics have been warning ever since its announcement, Snowy 2.0 doesn’t stack up economically, technically or environmentally.
Economically, Snowy 2.0 will never pay for itself. The initial cost estimate of $2bn has blown out ten-fold to around $20bn – $10+ billion for the plant (when Snowy Hydro finally includes all costs and overruns) and another $9+ billion for 1000km of 500kV transmission connections to Sydney and Melbourne.
This $20bn will be borne by taxpayers and electricity consumers. The federal government has already contributed $1.4bn to the project, with much more to come.
Technically, Snowy 2.0 is not a renewable generator nor does it provide baseload power, as some mistakenly believe. It is the equivalent of a battery, and as such will be a net load on the National Electricity Market.
And Snowy 2.0 will be a very inefficient battery, consuming about 1.5 kilowatt-hours for pumping for each 1.0 kilowatt-hour it delivers, due to losses in the pumping/ generation cycle and in transmission (two ways). Further, its claimed cyclic storage capacity will be constrained by the unequal volumes of the upper and lower reservoirs and the need to integrate operation with the existing Tumut 3 pumped hydro station.
Environmentally, vast construction sites and roads/tracks across 35km of Kosciuszko National Park have destroyed thousands of hectares of native alpine habitat. Twenty million tonnes of excavated spoil will be dumped in the Park and reservoirs, enough to cover a football field to a height of three kilometres.
Pest fish and pathogens will be transported from Talbingo Reservoir to Tantangara Reservoir and then across the alps into the Murray, Snowy, Murrumbidgee and Tumut headwaters, overwhelming native species and devastating trout fishing. Four 330kV transmission lines on two sets of 70-metre towers will traverse eight kilometres of the Park over a cleared easement swathe up to 140 metres wide. This will be the first time transmission lines are erected in a NSW national park for 50 years.
So far, all that has been constructed are two access tunnels to the location of the underground power station cavern, lots of roads and building sites, and tens of thousands of stockpiled tunnel lining segments. A few billion has been sunk, including the public’s $1.4bn, but there are many more billions to go.
It is now clear the project will cost at least $20bn, far exceeding its benefits, and not be completed till the 2030s, incurring extensive environmental, social and community costs. There is no question that significant energy storage is required to support the transition to renewable energy. But it is patently obvious Snowy 2.0 is the wrong project in the wrong place – there are better alternatives.
There is no easy solution. Should the government pull the plug, or soldier on regardless?
At what point does the project become ridiculously unviable, if not already as I and others contend has been the case since inception? What is in the best interests of all Australians, who are being lumbered with the risks and costs?
With so much more public money yet to be spent and environmental destruction yet to be wrought, it would be irresponsible for the government to continue to rely solely on Snowy Hydro’s advice and just blithely allow the project to stumble on regardless, thinking it is too far gone to stop. The minister must address this folly, not just express his “deep concern” with each damning revelation.
The immediate priority is for the government to commission an independent review, as experts have been urging for years. Regular independent reviews are standard practice for major infrastructure projects, but have never been undertaken for this project.
Not till there is a comprehensive reassessment of the costs, benefits, time frames, technical risks, etc, will the government be in a position to make a well-considered decision with all the facts before it, in this case regrettably to choose the least-worse option.
With construction still in the initial stages and completion not till next decade, there is time to comprehensively reassess the project.
Surely the point has been reached when enough is enough. The Australian
The claim that rising global surface temperatures will induce more storm activity is contradicted by observations.
Scientists reporting on the contrasting albedo effects of clouds in the Northern vs. Southern Hemispheres (Blanco et al., 2023) assess clouds have a “profound” effect on the global radiation budget and thus our climate.
The Southern Hemisphere is cloudier than the Northern Hemisphere at the same latitudes, and hence the sea surface temperatures are colder.
In contrast to the claim that warmer temperatures fuel more storms and stronger winds, cloud-albedo-induced colder temperatures are viewed as a trigger (“cloud-controlling factor”) for the stronger Southern Hemisphere’s wind speeds and storm tracks.
This is the opposite of what is claimed by proponents of anthropogenic global warming, as it implies we get fewer or less intense storms as the surface warms.
Theoretical physics also supports the observation that warmer surface temperatures lead to fewer, not more, storm events. Heat reduces the capacity for the hydrological cycle to do work, or power “large-scale atmospheric circulation or…very intense storms” (Laliberte et al., 2015).
Indeed, long-term storm records also support the conclusion that colder periods have more and stronger storms, and warmer periods have fewer and less intense storms. (Degeai et al., 2015).
The spectre of power failure is haunting Europe as Britain and Germany demonstrate that modern societies can’t run on wind and solar power. Wind droughts are the fatal flaw in the system and one can envisage a future book titled How Wind Droughts Destroyed Western Civilisation.
Long bursts of calm weather are no mystery to sailors and kite flyers, but the wind industry apparently never got the memo. Hence the type of indignation expressed when the wind fails to materialize – in its financial statements, Australian outfit, Infigen has repeatedly cursed the Wind Gods for its often-dismal profit results.
The industry has started calling a hitherto well-known meteorological phenomenon a “wind drought”. As if there’s some basis to expect that the wind will blow around-the-clock, at a constant 11m/s – the ideal rate at which wind turbines operate.
Rafe Champion has been tracking these so-called “wind droughts” and their consequences for our power supply for some time. Here he is again.
The endless wind drought crippling renewables Spectator Australia Rafe Champion 23 April 2023
The spectre of power failure is haunting Europe as Britain and Germany demonstrate that modern societies can’t run on wind and solar power. Wind droughts are the fatal flaw in the system and one can envisage a future book titled How Wind Droughts Destroyed Western Civilisation. Think about the consequences of a system blackout if Net Zero policies are pursued to the bitter end in Western Europe and Australia…
Texas in 2021 gave us a glimpse of the abyss during a spell of low wind and a serious cold snap. Hundreds died and it would have been thousands if the state had gone completely black, instead of hanging on by a thread. Now, Texas is planning to subsidise gas producers to maintain capacity in the face of competition from subsidised wind and solar power.
Wind droughts were not properly considered in the rush to decarbonise the power supply, but they can’t be ignored any longer. The burning question is: How did the meteorologists fail to issue wind drought warnings? They monitor every other kind of extreme weather to feed the inexhaustible appetite of the media for bad news about ‘climate change’.
In Australia the answer is easy. According to a CSIRO report in 2002, the Bureau of Meteorology used the average velocity of the wind for weeks and months to measure wind resources with information collected at hundreds of sites established by the BOM during the 1990s. Tom Quirk and Paul Miskelly first reported wind droughts using the AEMO data which reports the output from the registered wind farms at five-minute intervals.
Our wind droughts mostly last less than a day and they max out around three days, based on the AEMO records. In the BOM records, a wind drought lasting three days would simply lower the number for the week or the month without signalling that there was a serious restriction in the supply.
The neglect of wind droughts in Europe is harder to explain because the Dunkelflaute or ‘dark doldrums’ (the still, dark periods), can persist for weeks. They must have been well-known to sailors for centuries, also to the millers who pumped water in Holland and those who milled grain across the continent. And what about the experience of recreational sailors in modern times? In the absence of readily available historical records, it was helpful to read this comment by ‘Michael’ on a recent post by my colleague Peter Smith. It is an extract from a 1901 book by H.G. Wells.
‘Wind was extremely inconvenient for the purpose of pumping [water from mines] because in these latitudes it is inconstant: it was costly, too, because “at any time the labourers might be obliged to sit at the pit’s mouth for weeks together whistling for a gale”.H.G. Wells, in Anticipations of the Reactions of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought, 1901.’
Yes Virginia, they did have wind droughts in England before 2020!
Official recognition in the wind industry was slow in coming, although the German policy of energiewende was clearly in trouble in 2018 when a government report admitted that it was failing on three vital metrics: cost, reliability, and emission reduction. Recently, there has been more coverage of wind issues, but officially the green transition is still happening. More research is required, with hard questions directed to the responsible authorities.
On the home front, in 2021 I put some hard questions to the energy ministers in each state. The objective was to present a paper at a seminar organised by the Clean Energy Authority. The paper would describe the due diligence performed in each state to take account of wind droughts
The abstract was submitted in good time, but it was not accepted for the program. Still, the investigation went on. All the states had ambitious green energy plans and I asked how they would deal with a month like June 2020 with multiple wind droughts. The bottom line was: ‘Please specify the quantity and the estimated cost of the various kinds of storage and any other resources that would be provided to cover a period like that.’ The relevant departments sent their plans but in my opinion, did not provide the detailed information that was requested.
Then followed persistent requests to the NSW Department of Planning, Industry, and Environment, for a conversation with a planner to discuss the matter of wind droughts. Eventually, they referred me to an officer in AEMO. He invoked the Holy Trinity of transmission lines, pumped hydro, and batteries. This is clutching at straws as energy realists have repeatedly explained.
We are left with serious concerns about the diligence and competence of our energy planners. Let’s see how it goes in NSW after Liddell Power Station closes at the end of the month. If you are worried, think about a home generator, or a move to Tasmania. Spectator Australia
A short account of polar explorer Roald Amundsen’s failed attempt to tame a polar bear cub he had bought in May 1920 from a trader in the Russian Far East appears today in the Barents Observer. The cub was likely captured after its mother was killed, which was a common practice at a time when polar bears were being slaughtered wholesale throughout the Arctic (Crockford 2019; Honderich 1991; Stirling 2011).
It only took a month for Amundsen to give up his experiment. Below are some excerpts; read the full account here. More photos are here.
One day, during Roald Amundsen’s voyage through the Northeast Passage, Georg Kibisow from the Russian Trading Company came aboard Amundsen’s ship, the Maud. He brought along a polar bear cub that he had caught near Kolyma. He offered the cub to Amundsen, who bought it.
Roald Amundsen named the polar bear cub Marie. He gave her a lot of attention in the hope of taming her so she could pull a sledge. Marie features a lot in Amundsen’s expedition diary and he followed her development closely. Here is a sample of what Amundsen wrote:
It’s not easy to make friends with Marie, but it might work. I carry her now, whenever I want, but I have to make sure I hold onto her head so she can’t bite me. She is constantly fighting with the dogs. This little critter has no fear.[and later]
I chloroformed Marie to death this morning. I had to abandon any hopes of training her. After grooming and feeding her for a month, this morning, when I brought her milk, she came at me in a ferocious rage. In the hands of an experienced trainer she might have become a bit friendlier, but I had to give up.
Context
Below is a map of the Kolyma district in the Russian Far East, which is essentially the drainage of the Kolyma River. The Kolyma River ends in a broad delta that empties into the East Siberian Sea, near the boundary with the Chukchi Sea. Winters in this region are extremely cold and is where most Arctic sea ice forms (Crockford 2022).
A fuller account of his Northeast Passage voyage is here, with more photos, including this one of Marie the polar bear cub in May 1920, and with one of the dog teams in October 1919:
References
Crockford, S.J. 2019.The Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened. Global Warming Policy Foundation, London.
Crockford, S.J. 2022. Polar bear fossil and archaeological records from the Pleistocene and Holocene in relation to sea ice extent and open water polynyas. Open Quaternary 8(7):1–26. https://doi.org.10.5334/oq.107
Honderich, J.E. 1991. Wildlife as a hazardous resource: an analysis of the historical interaction of humans and polar bears in the Canadian arctic. MA thesis, University of Waterloo, Ontario.
Stirling, I. 2011.Polar Bears: The Natural History of a Threatened Species. Fitzhenry & Whiteside, Markham, Ontario.
Now that the American Dream has been turned into a nightmare in part by overspending that has led to the highest interest rates in the 21st Century, it is high time to admit that, as Melanie Mcdonagh writes in The Telegraph, the electric vehicle dream, too, “has turned into a nightmare.”
Power supply for electric car charging. Electric car charging station. Close up of the power supply plugged into an electric car being charged.
Now that the American Dream has been turned into a nightmare in part by overspending that has led to the highest interest rates in the 21st Century, it is high time to admit that, as Melanie Mcdonagh writes in The Telegraph, the electric vehicle dream, too, “has turned into a nightmare.”
Mcdonagh, who admits she does not drive, points out many problems, among them the horrific impact when a heavy, quiet-running electric vehicle hits an unsuspecting pedestrian or a cyclist. She also notes that some of these “vehicles” are collecting data on route history and road speed that governments (and corporations) can use for remote surveillance (and marketing gimmickry). Another problem is that the much heavier EVs could collapse bridges and force lengthy detours.
Mcdonagh, however, has barely scratched the surface of the mess created by the hipster culture that believes everything sacred must be sacrificed before the god of carbon (dioxide) reduction. It turns out that manufacturing electric vehicles has to date been a bad investment for automakers, despite all the subsidies.
Ford Motor Co. says it will lose $3 billion on EV sales this year, after losing $900 million in 2021 and $2.1 billion in 2022, when the company sold 96,000 units. Price drops by Ford and Tesla (and doubtless other companies) are not coming because the vehicles are cheaper to manufacture but because demand has slowed despite the new Biden subsidies. As Robert Bryce points out, Ford in the first quarter of this year lost $66,446 on every EV it sold.
One reason for the huge losses is the increasing price of battery materials, reflected in the 7 percent increase in the volume-weighted average for lithium-ion battery packs from 2021 to 2022. The Biden subsidies are supposed to offset such costs, just as the Biden build in America plan (in Michigan, at least, by Chinese companies) has no chance of diminishing China’s huge lead in EV battery and vehicle production.
Senator John Kennedy (R, LA) recently asked, “If electric cars are so swell. why does government have to pay people to drive them?”
A new J.D. Power report points to a number of reasons that American consumers are sticking with internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles. While the highest objections to EVs are high prices and lack of public charging infrastructure, vehicle range, charging times, and the threat of grid disruptions that render EVs useless are also deterrents. Other concerns are fires, power surges that lead to accidents, towing capacity and range, and performance in bad weather.
Even a third of Gen Z shoppers, who have been bombarded with pro-EV propaganda for most of their lives, admit they are unlikely to buy one.
It is obvious that the EV boom, such as it is, has been powered nearly entirely by heavy subsidies and marketing hype initiated by bureaucrats and politicians, most of whom have no background in auto sales or any service industries. Their M.O. is bribery and thuggery (forcing people into unwanted choices through market manipulation). Automakers are beginning to balk at these techniques, if only because they see their customer base shrinking once people cannot buy the vehicles they have used for decades.
While Ford and other companies are now boasting of the towing capacity of their EVs, the proof is in the pudding, as they say. MotorBiscuit last month reported that the Ford F-150 Lightning and Rivian R1T can be souped up to tow 10,000 pounds, far short of the gasoline-powered F-150, but with an average range of only 88 miles. That hardly works for multiple tows in a day or for towing a trailer to a campsite 100 or more miles from home.
Imagine putting your family into the truck, hitching up the Airstream, and driving out to the mountains for a weekend at the lake. Finding a charging station where you don’t have to unhitch the trailer to get to the plug-in is a huge challenge, and you have to do this multiple times on a 300-mile trip. With a maximum 90-mile range, you need to recharge every 60 or 70 miles, taking 30 minutes or more for each recharge. You lose an entire day each way. So practical.
Far worse, though, are the risks and challenges to tow truck drivers with an EV that has stopped running. Not only are the vehicles heavy, they are dead weight, locked in park, and potentially suspect to spontaneous fires that ordinary extinguishers cannot put out. A 2021 National Transportation Safety Board report notes that “the energy remaining in a damaged high-voltage lithium-ion battery, known as stranded energy, poses a risk of electric shock and creates the potential for thermal runaway that can result in battery reignition and fire.”
Of course, the bean counters with their glorious visions for an all-electric future (replete with blackouts, price increases, and other tricks to keep the majority of people off the roads entirely) do not take into consideration ANY of the real reasons people drive cars and trucks. Their ONLY consideration appears to be the imaginary reduction in carbon dioxide emissions their computer models insist can only happen by inconveniencing “the little people.”
But should those “little people” elect leaders who will end the inflationary subsidies and dictatorial mandates (including those that ban gas appliances, cripple the performance of dishwashers and HVAC units, etc.), the automakers who have heavily invested in EVs will adjust to real market conditions and continue improving long-cherished technologies.
In today’s increasingly top-down world, Mcdonagh points out that “you can’t even discuss the problems with electric cars without getting jumped on.” That is already beginning to change, especially in a freedom-loving America that has had a century-long love affair with the open road.
Meanwhile, lurking in the shadows is an option that could both reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide and keep ICE vehicles on the road. Hydrogen-based synthetic e-fuels may be expensive today, but they can power ICE vehicles today and tomorrow without sacrificing a nation to the whims of China’s maniacal leadership.
Duggan Flanakin is a Senior Policy Analyst with the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow.
A former Senior Fellow with the Texas Public Policy Foundation, Mr. Flanakin authored definitive works on the creation of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and on environmental education in Texas.
A brief history of his multifaceted career appears in his book, “Infinite Galaxies: Poems from the Dugout.”
Cultivated meat is made by growing muscle tissue from stem cells. Meat produced from cultured cells could be 25 times worse for the climate than regular beef unless scientists find ways to overhaul energy-intensive steps in its production.
New Scientist: Analysis finds the carbon footprint of cultivated meat is likely to be higher than beef if current production methods are scaled up because they are still highly energy-intensive. Cultivated meat is made by growing muscle tissue from stem cells. Meat produced from cultured cells could be 25 times worse for the climate than regular beef unless scientists find ways to overhaul energy-intensive steps in its production.
Analysis finds the carbon footprint of cultivated meat is likely to be higher than beef if current production methods are scaled up because they are still highly energy-intensive
Cultivated meat is made by growing muscle tissue from stem cells
Meat produced from cultured cells could be 25 times worse for the climate than regular beef unless scientists find ways to overhaul energy-intensive steps in its production.
Lab-grown or “cultivated” meat is made by growing animal stem cells around a scaffold in a nutrient-rich broth. It has been proposed as a kinder and greener alternative to traditional meat because it uses less land, feed, water and antibiotics than animal farming and removes the need to farm and slaughter livestock, …
If you think "lab meat" would come with lower emissions than real meat, think again. Well on the contrary: according to a new cradle-to-gate life cycle assessment, its impact would be orders of magnitude higher (4-25x !!) than median beef production.https://t.co/Vo3kdwEI45https://t.co/183BQAtD9Gpic.twitter.com/eaZdkIBVBG
And then we're not even talking about what this would look like if we'd also account for the actual contribution to further warming (GWP versus GWP* metrics).https://t.co/NdeBuxaExR
"Despite the billions of dollars being invested in “cellular agriculture”, there are significant technical, ethical, regulatory, and commercial challenges to getting these products widely available in the market." https://t.co/X79bpCYZpF
CNBC: Billionaires, including Bill Gates, say there is no way to produce enough meat traditionally to feed the world population of the future…Dubbed clean meat, the efforts are distinct from “fake meat,” like the soy protein “chicken” you can find in your grocery store today. Unlike Morningstar or Boca Burgers, clean meat really is meat; it just grows in a lab instead of being part of an animal. …
Billionaires, including Bill Gates, say there is no way to produce enough meat traditionally to feed the world population of the future….Gates wrote on his personal blog, Gatesnotes.com, a few years ago. “Put simply, there’s no way to produce enough meat for 9 billion people. Yet we can’t ask everyone to become vegetarians. That’s why we need more options for producing meat without depleting our resources.”
Bill Gates: “I do think all rich countries should move to 100% synthetic beef. You can get used to the taste difference, and the claim is they’re going to make it taste even better over time. Eventually, that green premium is modest enough that you can sort of change the [behavior of] people or use regulation to totally shift the demand.” … Gates: “I mean, these are good things – in fact, buying Beyond Burgers [a plant-based “meat” company that Gates invests in] actually drives demand, which will get the quality up and the rate premium down, so consumer behavior is important.
“The challenge for such products has tended to be that no matter how they taste, their texture doesn’t resemble meat. That’s something the use of 3D-printing technology could overcome, as it creates layers of interwoven fibres that more closely mimic the real thing.”
Climate Depot’s Marc Morano: “You Will Eat lab-grown ‘meat’ and bugs — and Be Happy. Or so the forces of the Great Food Reset believe. Bill Gates is gobbling up U.S. farmland (now the single largest owner) and the World Economic Forum pushes eating bugs, and the U.S. FDA and USDA edge closer to approving lab-grown ‘meat’ — Bon appetite?!
If you want to eat lab-grown or bugs, that should be your choice. But, the climate agenda/Great Reset goal is to collapse modern high-yield agriculture and meat production to meet net-zero climate goals. As shortages and prices skyrocket on meat and other foods, it will be much easier to push insect-eating and lab-grown ‘meat’ to the public.
A food crisis and transformation are just the ticket for even more chaos that the WEF can exploit for their Reset agenda. The World Economic Forum is so eager to promote synthetic ‘meat’ that they are touting numerous ways to print up to 6 kilograms of the fake meat an hour. As part of this new coerced Great Diet Reset, the WEF has advocated eating bugs to save the planet. The Davos-based group has explained, “Why we might be eating insects soon.”
Our future is being planned by our overlords, load up on eating bugs to save the planet! It is a future that will happen, only if we allow it. It’s time for the Great Reject. Rise up and defy the Great Reset.”
The news — widely reported as an FDA “approval” of lab-grown meat — signifies the completion of the first, and biggest, of the three regulatory steps Upside Foods must complete before its “cultivated” chicken attains full approval and can be sold to the public, according to TIME.
Upside Foods “will use animal cell culture technology to take living cells from chickens and grow the cells in a controlled environment to make the cultured animal cell food,” the FDA said. … Some also questioned Upside Foods’ connections to figures and entities such as Cargill, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, Kimbal Musk, brother of Elon Musk and co-founder of The Kitchen, “a growing family of businesses that pursues an America where everyone has access to real food,” and the World Economic Forum (WEF).
CBS News, drawing from a report in the journal Nature, also took this view, writing, “Scientists say roughly a third of all human-produced greenhouse gasses stem from food production, especially cattle. Proponents of lab-grown meat say it would help cut back on methane emissions and help combat global warming.” … The company brought in investors such as Bill Gates, Cargill and Richard Branson during its Series A funding round in 2017. … Gates is on record saying, “All rich countries should move to 100% synthetic beef.” The Daily Mail, quoting the Associated Press, noted Gates is considered the largest private owner of farmland in the U.S., having “quietly amassed” close to 270,000 acres.
You must be logged in to post a comment.